Hewlett-Packard is taking a step away from traditional server design with the new Proliant SL4500 server, which mixes processing, networking, and storage units to optimize performance of applications like OpenStack and Hadoop.

HP claims that its new HP ProLiant SL4500 server offers an efficient design that consumes significanty less space, power and lower cost compared to other systems, while it has also fewer cables. It's modular design allows for optimization of infrastructure for a workload-specific application.

The HP ProLiant SL4500 server series supports multiple Apache Hadoop vendors including Cloudera and Hortonworks, as well as additional software including OpenStack Cloud Software and MongoDB.

Based on the HP Smart Array technology, the server promises to deliver performance with a nearly seven times faster input/output operations per second (IOPS) than existing HDD-based architectures. In addition, with the smart analytics of HP SmartCache, the system will optimize storage traffic to ensure the lowest latency response.

The new HP ProLiantSL4500 server series is delivering storage density of up to 240 terabytes (TB) in a single 4.3-rack-unit (U) chassis, or 2.16 petabytes (PB) with nine servers in an industry-standard 42-U rack.

The latest member of the HP ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) family is also built with HP ProActive Insight Architecture, which embeds intelligence and automation capabilities. These include:

The new HP ProLiant SL270s Gen8 servers will be available next month, with for a starting price of $6,166. The HP ProLiant SL250s Gen8 servers will be available with NVIDIA Kepler and Intel Xeon Phi processors early next year for a starting price of $5,659.